Kate Atkinson’s panoramic novel gripping from first pages

After her 1995 debut novel beat Salman Rushdie for the coveted Whitbread Prize, bestselling author Kate Atkinson was irritated by headlines in the British media dismissing her as a former chambermaid.

After her 1995 debut novel beat Salman Rushdie for the coveted Whitbread Prize, bestselling author Kate Atkinson was irritated by headlines in the British media dismissing her as a former chambermaid.Ian Gavan
/ Getty Images

Novelist Kate Atkinson places us in a German cafe on a rainy November night in 1930, just in time for her doughty young heroine to seal her doom by attempting to shoot Adolf Hitler dead.

But wait a minute. Is Ursula Todd really exiting this mortal coil — brought down by gunfire from Hitler’s henchmen — only two pages into the book? Well, not exactly. Not when we then spin back 20 years to the night of February 11, 1910, to the infant Ursula’s birth and — wait for this — almost immediate death. You see, the weather is bad, the doctor doesn’t arrive in time, and Ursula strangles on her birth cord. What can be more conclusive than that?

Ah, not so fast, dear reader. Again we underestimate Kate Atkinson’s audacity as a novelist. Turn another page, and we get a rerun of Ursula’s birth — only now Dr. Fellowes does make it in time and delivers a healthy infant girl.

Yet all is not necessarily well. When Ursula reaches five, she drowns at the seaside. But then comes an alternate scenario — she is saved by a stranger who returns Ursula and her sister “sopping wet and tearful” to their mother.

Indeed, in the course of this panoramic novel, which moves from a late Edwardian England through the convulsions of two world wars, Ursula continues to die repeatedly while also getting the chance to live life again and again in the hope that she finally can get it right.

Hitler even resurfaces, this time in the late 1930s and in greater detail (we learn he has bad breath) and in the company of his lively but empty-headed mistress, Eva Braun.

As always, Kate Atkinson is full of surprises, She’s that way in person too.

“I read a review somewhere which said this novel was experimental,” Atkinson says — and she sounds genuinely puzzled. She figures it’s the sort of verdict one might hear from a blinkered male critic who would never question innovation in a male writer but who thinks a female writer acting similarly must somehow be stepping “out of the frame.”

As an established bestselling novelist (mere days after its publication in Canada by Doubleday, Live After Life was already racking up big numbers), this 61-year-old grandmother shows a disarming readiness to speak her mind. So yes — ever since the fuss over her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, she has considered the British media somewhat sexist. She may laugh about it — Atkinson is blessed with the gift of laughter — but she no longer gives U.K. interviews.

She occupies her own astonishing niche. Yet, she sees herself as a traditionalist, the difference here being that she’s also anxious to explore the endless possibilities the fictional form offers an adventurous writer. She’s wary of labels like “experimental” and “post-modern” — and she’s been called both.

There’s a refreshing matter-of-factness about Atkinson as — casually dressed in denims with her eyeglasses shoved high above her forehead — she relaxes in her Toronto publisher’s office to chat about a body of work which now comprises nine novels, including a quartet of highly original crime thrillers, and reflects on the remarkable literary success story launched by Behind the Scenes at the Museum in 1995.

That debut novel, with characteristic Atkinson cheek, began in the womb at the moment its beguiling female narrator was conceived. It went on to beat out the hallowed Salman Rushdie for the coveted Whitbread Prize, much to the horror of some in Britain’s literary establishment. She’s still chafing over the way the British media treated her Whitbread win — particularly those headlines dismissing her as a former chambermaid.

“They behaved very badly,” she remembers, adding that if she had been a man she wouldn’t have been treated this way. “They decided I was somehow déclassé because as a student, I’d worked as a chambermaid. … There was a huge amount of very sexist reporting.”

As for triumphing over Rushdie? “That was wrong, just WRONG!” she laughs good-naturedly.

She wishes she could tell you that her intricately structured books are the result of intricate planning, but she can’t. With Life After Life, she did know that she wanted to write about the London Blitz — and she does so in such harrowing detail that it’s hard to believe she wasn’t actually there enduring the horrors of nightly German bombing raids.

She also wanted to examine the idea of living parallel lives. But beyond that, she had little idea of the 475-page novel that would emerge.

She also had her title. “I can’t write a book unless I have a title,” Atkinson concedes cheerfully. “Then, I literally start typing.

“I knew I wanted that Hitler thing at the beginning,” she adds, but that’s all she knew. Well, yes, she had to get Ursula born — “but I hadn’t even envisaged how she would be or where she would live.”

As it turned out, Ursula would be spending her early years with her family in a country place called Fox Corners, a place so fully realized, in a manner reminiscent of an E.M. Forster novel, that it almost becomes a character in its own right. But again, Atkinson stresses that she had no idea how the story would unreel.

“No, I didn’t. I never thought I would spend so much time in the 1920s and 1930s, but I really enjoyed writing about them in a way that I hadn’t expected to.”

She knows that many novelists plan and plot their books exhaustively, “I wish I did,” she says with rueful smile. “I did try with one book and it was disastrous. I don’t stick to a plan. … I think as I write. I need to write to think.”

Life After Life may evoke thoughts of Virginia Woolf’s gender-switching Orlando or the classic Bill Murray movie, Groundhog Day, or the so- called “time” plays of her fellow Yorkshire writer, J.B. Priestley, who was fascinated by the theory that all time happens simultaneously.

But Atkinson treads her own path, at one significant moment invoking Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “You can step in the same river. But the water will always be new.”

Atkinson wanted to focus on just one protagonist — Ursula — so she could build layers.

“To me each of her lives is a layer, rather than a life, because she’s adding all these layers to her consciousness, whether she’s aware of it or not. I think I needed one person, so her character remains the same but not the way she lives her life because that changes a lot. And I think that was neatly tied to the war because I wanted someone who would become heroic.”

Overseas reviews have cited the compulsive readability of Life After Life, despite a potentially intimidating premise. But Atkinson never felt intimidated by what she was attempting.

“Not at all,” she laughs. “I’m never daunted. I’m one of those ‘oh, I’ll start writing a book’ people. I didn’t think too much about it. I just sat down and wrote. And I wanted to sit down and write. And I really enjoyed writing this book, and I think it shows actually. When I got to the end, I thought: One, I will miss writing this book; and, two, I wish they were all as easy.”

Life After Life

By Kate Atkinson

Doubleday

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